Dark Beginnings

Two girls with very different home lives but friends since either could remember, one night find themselves in a life or death situation. After what was supposed to be a little fun, they come face to face with a murderous monster from whereabouts unknown. Somehow they manage to defeat the creature and absorb its space/time powers slowly, garnering strength over time. But while one tries to keep her powers subtle the other realizes the dark potential behind them.

When most people think of witches they imagine something from ‘The Wizard of Oz’; green skin, warts, and a black pointy hat. Or maybe you’ve seen those movies where the witches are girls who messed with the wrong powers that be, or its part of their blood line, and shenanigans ensue.

In reality, magic, well it’s something else altogether.

Somewhere between science and the unknown lies what we know as magic. It’s not cook books and cauldrons, or strange sentences in languages that no one understands. It’s a force, a power beyond anything else imaginable, and once you have it, it corrupts your soul.

My name is Katherine, and I watched my friend Saturday seduced by what magic did for her, when she and I became witches together. We didn’t make a pact with Satan, we didn’t bleed chickens or cut our wrists or anything like that. We simply took something from a traveler that never should have come into our possession, and that was when this whole mess began, about one year ago now.

When I was a kid my father ran off on us. He was the typical dead beat dad that you hear about. He drank too much and he spent all his money; our money. But the one thing he never did was lay a finger on me or my mother, he never raised his voice to us, never threatened to hurt us. He was just never there.

Saturday wasn’t so lucky. Our father’s worked together at this old paper mill that shut down years ago. They were high school drinking buddies, and while my dad usually drank and passed out, Saturday’s father turned a different shade of grey.

Saturday would constantly come to school with bruises on her arms that she claimed she had gotten by falling down or being clumsy. I always knew she was lying to me.

The month my father left me and my mother was the same month Saturday’s father went to jail finally after his wife called the cops. She had had enough of the beatings on both her and her daughter. But for Saturday, as I later discovered, it was already too late.

That was also the month of my 12th birthday, Saturday had already turned 12. I remember it was a quiet birthday, my mom crying in the kitchen while Saturday kept trying to get me to play with her. It was one I would like to forget but likely never will. Saturday’s arms had still not healed from the last few blows her father had given her before he was lead away in handcuffs, and she cringed every time someone touched her.

We ended up in my playhouse in the backyard eating cake alone. That was when Saturday decided we should make a pact.

“We should promise each other no boy will ever do to us what they did to our mothers,” she said, “and no boy will ever come between us, promise?”

She held out a pinky at me and I stared at it for a while. It was bandaged; her father had broken a few of her fingers too. I finally wrapped my pinky gently around it but she pulled hard on it and cringed.

“Pinky swear?” she said and shook our hands cringing more.

“Pinky swear,” I said.

Now we were both 18, on the verge of adulthood, we’d both kissed boys, and Saturday had done a lot more as well, whereas I had been more conservative.

“You don’t have to be such a prude with guys Katy,” she used to say, “they’re not going to run off like your dad if you do more with them.”

Those words used to sting but it was like Saturday had no idea what she was doing, or maybe she did. Either way I was always too meek to say anything, afraid to spoil what we had, our friendship, our connection. After all we were like sisters, bastard sisters with no fathers. The men in our lives didn’t care for us like they should have and we had no father figure in our lives.

Maybe that was why Saturday always went for the cliché older bad boy, the guy who had a record with the cops and a bad attitude to boot.

Sometimes the guys she brought to hang out scared me. They would stare at me as though I were the fresh cut of that day.

So much for our pinky swear, I used to think. Saturday was headed in the same direction as her mom.

But none of that mattered now, I was getting ready for college, Saturday had dropped out of school and was working part time at a clothing store, that her mother knew about, and part time at a strip club. And soon she wouldn’t be my problem anymore.

I knew eventually when was in school we would grow apart and we’d come across each other 20 years later. Me a graduate and hard working independent woman, her a druggy with 5 kids and no alimony.

They were mean thoughts I knew, and part of me hated myself for thinking them, but part of me accepted them as the truth, and treated them almost like fantasies.

Saturday the one who knew it all would become the one with nothing.

But that night is when it all changed, and neither of us would be the same again.

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